Thursday, August 14, 2008

Freaking Out about "Freaked"

This has been a freaky week for your favorite Poetry & Popular Culture blog, which accidentally helped to create what one reader called a "media frenzy" around J.T. Dutton's forthcoming novel "Freaked." I highlighted Dutton's book on August 9 because the novel—like many other novels in 20th century American literature—incorporates poetry, including Grateful Dead song lyrics, on a number of levels. For Dutton, this incorporation was made, um, more difficult than she expected because the copyright owner for the Dead songs (Ice 9) wouldn't allow Dutton to quote as extensively as she wanted to do.

University of Iowa Communications Professor Kembrew McLeod—a specialist in the politics of copyright and proud owner of the trademark for "Freedom of Expression"—sent an excerpt from my post on Dutton's book to Boing Boing, which ran it under the somewhat sensational headline, "Grateful Dead lyrics cannot be quoted in children's book." That posting quickly created a furor. From fans claiming Ice 9 was betraying the Dead's legacy by restricting use of the band's lyrics, to folks advocating for copyright protection of artists' work, people responded passionately to the behind-the-scenes copyright issues of Dutton's book. You can see that discussion here: http://www.boingboing.net/2008/08/12/grateful-dead-lyrics.html. "Poetry & Popular Culture" registered this energy as well, with a massive spike in site traffic: thanks to McLeod and Boing Boing, there were 676 visits to "Poetry & Popular Culture" on August 14, up from 30 the day before; there were 665 views of the post on Dutton's book; 84% of visitors were new to the site.

Dutton herself eventually weighed in on the issue, clarifying that her relationship with Ice 9 was amicable and explaining Ice 9's concerns with allowing extensive use of the band's lyrics. Here's what Dutton wrote:

Hi,I am the author of Freaked and here is my perspective on this story. I had no legal battles or even conflict with Ice 9. I contacted them for permissions and they offered me some, but not all of what I wanted. Usually money changes hands when writers ask for permissions. In my case, Ice 9 gave me the use of what lyrics I did use for free.

Their hesitation about giving the full amount had to do with the feeling that allowing me to use too much would seem to be an endorsement of my work. Getting their endorsement would be huge--as one commenter put it, a money vein. Of course they have to be careful about what they lend. I wrote about the Dead because I happen to love their music, and using their lyrics was part of telling this story.

Yours,J. T. Dutton

For a while, Dutton's posting put a stop to the argument on Boing Boing. Without the saga of a legal battle to propel the matter, and with Dutton's report of her compromise with Ice 9, people backed off and the discussion stalled. What I see as a central issue with "Freaked" went no further: no matter how amicable the compromise with Ice 9, the legalities of copyright—and the economic power Ice 9 leveraged to grant or refuse permission—forced Dutton to change the book and compomise her original vision. The book that your bookstore will carry is not the book Dutton entirely wanted; in the end, for better or worse, economics trumped the art.

I'm bringing this up now because the passion unleashed by Boing Boing's headline—a passion which demonstrates the proprietary interests that consumers, music listeners, and readers have in the texts they hear and support—has its roots in the popular culture of poetry in the 19th and early 20th centuries. We're familiar with the fan's sense of ownership over, and participation in, the rock and roll song and its success—see your mix tapes, your fan zines, the Boing Boing commenters who claim to carry on the Dead's communitarian spirit in an era when their works are copyright protected, etc. But this passion, and this way of engaging with texts (be they read or heard) is not unique to rock and roll culture.

We only have to look at a book like Meredith McGill's "American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853" (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003) to realize that the controversy stretches back nearly 200 years. In this book, McGill reports on the formation of copyright law in the early nineteenth century U.S. and how many Americans perceived copyrighting to be downright anti-American—more a legacy of British aristocratic culture than an expression of America's democracy and equal availability and ownership of texts once they were made public, purchased, and owned.

This was (and is, if the controversy over the Dead lyrics is any indication) especially the case with poetry, which was short, easily excerpted and reprinted, easily clipped and saved in poetry scrapbooks, easily slipped into and out of what Joseph Harrington calls new and different "presentation contexts." (See his book "Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern U.S. Poetics" [Wesleyan UP, 2002].) Poems by Longfellow and Poe were reprinted word for word with impunity in this pre-royalties age, and not just on brochures for noble civic and educational events, but in advertisements as well. When American readers clipped poems from newspapers and magazines for their scrapbooks, they regularly cut off the author's name and bibliographical information; for many individuals, those things meant far less than they do now. (In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that a byline is positioned underneath the title or headline today—rather than being printed at the end of a poem or article—because it makes cutting the author's name off much more difficult than if it appeared at the end). As the 19th century scrapbook art in the image to the left illustrates, this is the age in which the collage ethic of popular culture was born.

There are many examples that illustrate the recirculation and cutting and pasting of poetry that characterized American culture and provides us with a historical understanding for the Boing Boing discussion surrounding the Dead Lyrics. I'll close by briefly highlighting Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day" which appears on the back of a 1944 Christmas dinner menu for the U.S.S. Lynx, pictured here. (How much you want to bet that no one asked Longfellow or his heirs or assigns for permission?)

"I Heard the Bells" was written during the Civil War in 1864 and was put to music in 1872. Like the Dead lyrics in Dutton's book, it is both poetry and song lyric. Here's the poem as Longfellow originally wrote it:

I heard the bells on Christmas dayTheir old familiar carols play,And wild and sweet the words repeatOf peace on earth, good will to men.

And thought how, as the day had come,The belfries of all ChristendomHad rolled along the unbroken songOf peace on earth, good will to men.

Till ringing, singing on its wayThe world revolved from night to day,A voice, a chime, a chant sublimeOf peace on earth, good will to men.

And in despair I bowed my head“There is no peace on earth,” I said,“For hate is strong and mocks the songOf peace on earth, good will to men.”

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;The wrong shall fail, the right prevailWith peace on earth, good will to men.”

Then from each black, accursed mouthThe cannon thundered in the South,And with the sound the carols drownedOf peace on earth, good will to men.

It was as if an earthquake rentThe hearth-stones of a continent,And made forlorn, the households bornOf peace on earth, good will to men.

But check out the redacted version of the poem that appears on the U.S.S. Lynx menu, in which stanzas 3, 6, and 7 have been cut entirely to form a new 4-stanza poem. Not only is the Lynx using Longfellow's verse as if it's a sort of common national resource that people can appropriate into different presentation contexts at will, but it shows no particular faithfulness to the original. In fact, the Lynx not only removes "I Heard the Bells" from its Civil War context, but it transforms a pretty depressing original poem (in which the households born of peace are made forlorn) into a little inspirational after-school-special in which the forces of God and right triumph over despair:

I heard the bells on Christmas dayTheir old familiar carols play,And wild and sweet the words repeatOf peace on earth, good will to men.

And thought how, as the day had come,The belfries of all ChristendomHad rolled along the unbroken songOf peace on earth, good will to men.

And in despair I bowed my head“There is no peace on earth,” I said,“For hate is strong and mocks the songOf peace on earth, good will to men.”

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;The wrong shall fail, the right prevailWith peace on earth, good will to men.”

Considering the drastic changes that the U.S.S. Lynx has made to the poem, it's a wonder that the ship nevertheless felt moved to print Longfellow's name as author at the same time. While, yes, Longfellow did write the words that appear on the menu, there really isn't any way to say he authored the actual poem that the Lynx has come up with for its Christmas meal.

I realize I've come a long way from the stir that Dutton's book elicited on Boing Boing, but the history of "I Heard the Bells" provides an interesting point of comparison: an artifact from a day when copyright ownership worked differently than it does today, and from a time when readers—at home with their scrapbooks or at sea on Christmas day—felt just as licensed to cut up, recirculate, or otherwise own poetry and song lyrics as they do now. Only nobody got as freaked out about it as they do today.

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About Me

Further thoughts on the intersection of poetry and popular culture: this being a record of one man's journey into good bad poetry, not-so-good poetry, commercial poetries, ordinary readers, puns, newspaper poetries, and other instances of poetic language or linguistic insight across multiple media in American culture primarily but not solely since the Civil War

"Mike Chasar's brilliant, witty book is the definitive guide to the growing field of American popular poetry. Empowered by prodigious research and informed by thorough knowledge of the traditional poetry canon, Chasar's five chapters take us deep into the way poetry functioned in the lives of ordinary people." — Cary Nelson, University of Illinois, editor of The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry

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"Burma-Shave quatrains, newspaper columns, scrapbooks with thousands of stanzas held together by affection and paste, folksy, pseudonymous, nationally famous radio hosts and the fans who sent them an avalanche of homemade verse: these are just some of the materials taken seriously in Mike Chasar’s extraordinarily memorable, and likely influential, study of popular American verse, and of the popular culture that grew up around it, for most of the twentieth century. Chasar combines the painstaking, arduous archival methods of real historians with the close analyses that we expect from literary critics, applied to verse, to images, and to informative prose ephemera. He persuasively links Williams Carlos Williams’s innovations to roadside signs, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop to the Hallmark card; he may change how you see some eminent writers’ work. Even more than that, however, Chasar should get twenty-first-century readers to sit up and notice the uses that so many Americans, only a couple of generations ago, found for the poetry that they enjoyed. Or, to take up a mode that Chasar appears to be the first to analyze: THIS OLD-TIME VERSE/ HAS LOTS TO SAY/ IF YOU CAN READ IT/ CHASAR’S WAY. His book is an ambitious, serious claim on present-day literary studies; it’s also a surprise, and a delight." — Stephen Burt, Harvard University, author of Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry

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"As Bob Dylan put it, 'We have our ideas about poets,' and we certainly have our ideas about poetry. Lately, those ideas have led to a national outcry in favor of bringing poetry back into American public life. But in Everyday Reading, Mike Chasarshows us that if we can rethink our ideas about poets and poetry, we will find that poems have always been part and parcel of modern life. This is an important—really, a necessary—book for anyone interested in modern poetics, in the history of reading, in the many appearances of poetry in the era of its supposed disappearance." — Virginia Jackson, University of California Irvine, author of Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading

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"This breakthrough study convincingly shows that American poetry in the opening decades of the twentieth century, far from being a largely elitist product that appealed to a limited audience, circulated among a number of different readers to a remarkable degree and left its traces in surprising areas." — Edward Brunner, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, author of Cold War Poetry

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"The lyric spring will never cease creating an emotional pressure, sought after by every searching consciousness—this is what Mike Chasar ... has shown in his book Everyday Reading" — Marina Zagidullina, New Literary Observer

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"[T]he originality of Chasar's close readings, the sheer amount of research informing each chapter, and the speculations on what can be learned from such careful analyses of popular cultural practices make Everyday Reading not so everyday and well worth reading." — Lisa Steinman, The Journal of American History

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"[The] tension between the poetic and the popular is the crux of Chasar's fun and thoughtful book. Chasar is a literary archaeologist. He excavates the poetry in Burma Shave ads, literary scrapbooks of the 1920s and 1930s, old time radio shows, and yes, even Hallmark cards. His close reading of [Paul] Engle's poem 'Easter' as well as the reproduction of the actual card is genius. His thesis is that early-twentieth-century market culture was saturated with poetry (as opposed to 'Poetry') that was participatory rather than exclusionary. This emotional interactivity with poetry, Chasar posits, set the stage for the bizarre matrix of media, commerce, and culture that would come to define the second half of the twentieth century." — Dean Rader, American Literature

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"Everyday Reading goes far in illustrating how poetry played a much larger role in most Americans' lives than it does today. Chasar paints a picture of a more various and ultimately dissident American public than most might have expected, a public for whom poetry was a crucial part of an overall strategy to counter the dominant political, economic, and social paradigms of their era. Written beautifully and researched meticulously, Everyday Reading will prove an important resource for political and cultural historians, literary scholars, and anyone else interested in how poetry transcends the page and becomes an active part of how we spend our days." — Daniel Kane, Journal of American Studies

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"Highly recommended." — Choice

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"Everyday Reading is sure to act as a touchstone for scholars interested in popular digital literature as well as the contemporary avant-garde....[It] concludes with a flourish: an anecdote about the author's grandmother's use of clipped poetry in wartime letters to her husband that evidences Chasar's arguments while remaining personal and poignant. It is a fitting moment for a book that is so innovative, important, and constantly successful" — David Levine, CollegeLiterature

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"Scrapbooking, which appears in other chapters following the first one, becomes the controlling metaphor for Chasar's study—and for reading habits today. With so many cultural products driven by individual tastes and various engines of a global economy, readers inevitably select and construct their own 'tradition,' which may have much or little to do with what they have been taught is important. Chasar's well-documented, thoughtful book offers the larger picture of this phenomenon, of which the battle for the best is only part of the story." — Rhonda Pettit, Reception

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"A brilliantly written book, startling the reader with his thorough research and analysis" — Sheila Erwin, Portland Book Review

Now Available from the University of Iowa Press

"[Poetry after Cultural Studies] should become an important part of debates about what poets do, what their poems are good for." — Stephen Burt, author of Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry